HAPPY THIRD BIRTHDAY ROAN AND LULA

Thank you both for making me a mom and teaching me something new every day.

BBALL WITH THE BIG BOYS

I will forever have to eat my words about the snarliness of boys, especially teenage boys.  Since having a very eager little sports man myself, I have found that almost every boy that Roan has approached on the playground has been unfailingly kind and generous with him.  

I'm sure part of it is because he is so ridiculously young and yet seems to already have the cojones to try to play with the big kids, but they always humor him and even try to give him lessons. Here a group of boys tried to teach Roan how to do a jump shot.  They declared that he had "skillz in his blood".  My favorite is the five year old who, although barely older, was like a little mentor.  Thank you, boys.

THE FORGOTTEN BOROUGH

I love staying in the city for holidays.  It's quiet and you don't have to deal with traffic.  Having everybody else leave is the ultimate staycation isn't it?

The Saturday of Memorial Day weekend poured buckets of rain, but Sunday emerged fresh as the morning dew, sunny and clear.  We decided to take a bike ride to Staten Island by way of a boat.  Sam, in his 13 years in New York, has never taken the Staten Island Ferry, so we set out with snacks and sunblock with Roan as copilot.

The one mistake we made was deciding to cross to Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge, which was 5 deep with lumbering tourists.  They ambled into the bike lane, slow to react to my shouts to GET OUT OF THE WAY.  Finally a fellow cyclist with an alarmingly shrill whistle came to our rescue.  

Moving on...

Riding to the terminal we passed the line for the ferry to Governors Island, which I think I have blogged about before.  The line was two hours long. What?  Insane. 

The Staten Island ferry might be the best public transportation this city has to offer.  It's free, leaves every half hour on the dot, and has incredible views.

Manhattan Skyline

 

Gulls ride the waves

Windy!

We actually had no plan for what to do when we got there, so we just took a left.  It started off pretty industrial and there was still a lot of damage from Hurricane Sandy.

As we neared the Verrazano Bridge we biked right into a place called Fort Wadsworth.  Wow.

Apparently Fort Wadsworth here was built strategically to protect New York Harbour but by the time it was completed it was basically obsolete. Frankly, I can't believe no one's turned it into a boutique hotel.

We ate lunch and tooled around for a bit before heading back to the ferry.

The ferry is the perfect place for a photographer because there's tons of people watching but since every tourist has a camera so you don't look like a creep.

Roan loved the ferry! Sam, I'm not so sure.

 

We decided to go back to Brooklyn via the Manhattan Bridge.  No boardwalk, thus no tourists.  Not so scenic but quick.  On the way through Chinatown we hit on one of those spontaneous, fascinating vignettes of urban life that make New York a remarkable place to live. 

The Eastern US Fujian Opera Troupe, complete with live orchestra.

All told, including the ferry ride, we clocked about 13 miles.  We were fried when we got home.  Sofa time was needed.

FROM THE MOUTHS OF BABES

NB: Apparently no one else can understand what Roan here is saying, which is "oh my God!"

I've had to be SO restrained with my penchant for cursing since Roan started to talk,  so it comes as a relief to me that this one (I am pretty sure) is all on Sam. And it's not too bad (twice, right at the beginning).  Plus he seems to have nailed usage in context.

Video courtesy of Sam too.

STOLEN

So there's this boy

He stole my heart

He calls me mom.

doing his best Bob Dylan impersonation

MOM

I doubt it is apparent from this blog how my mom and I SO did not get along in my teenage years.  I believe, in fact, that we did not utter a kind word to each other for the entire year of 1990.  We were two bull moose locking antlers.  And yet, ironically, I think she kind of meant it to be that way. My mom had every intention of raising a girl who was as strong willed, outspoken, and opinionated as she was, although I think she got more than she bargained for.

Saying that my mom is a "personality" is like saying that Sybil was a bit of a personality.  My mom is ALL Susan ALL the time, which I found exasperating at fourteen.  She had blue and purple spiky hair and a mouth to match.  Why couldn't she just be my mom and blend in to the mom wallpaper behind all the other kids? Mind you, I had flaming red hair but this was supposed to be my prerogative as an expressive adolescent, not hers. 

Behind the scenes of all of this quirkiness and bravado I was oblivious to what my mom was really doing, which was taking care of other people all the time.  She worked at a homeless shelter for people with disabilities. She went back to nursing school in her 40s, which meant tackling algebra again for the first time in 30 years (of course, she was nominated to give the speech for her graduating class at NYU). She raised an angsty teenager and a small child in a crowded apartment with my dad who, awesome though he was, worked all the time. She had to usher her ailing parents and aunt through long, slow declines of alcoholism and Alzheimers and death pretty much by herself.  She faced this all with a directness and humor that I now understand to be the only practical way of dealing with a tragic situation without going crazy in the process.

At the time I think I misinterpreted the goal of all of this strong female will to be conquering a successful career.  But when I think about it now I realize that she was after something bigger, namely for me to be able to cope with any shit the universe threw at me.  To not hedge, to not avoid or hide or backpedal as so many are apt to do in the presence of fear and the absence of coping.  I don't think without having this fortitude ground into be from birth that I could have survived Lula's life and death.  And without my mom, who dropped everything, retired from her job and pretty much moved in with us, Lula would not likely have lived as long as she did.

Being a mom really is a terrifying responsibility.  In the natural order of the universe everyone's mom is their first and last line of defense. One of the most frightening realizations I had as Lula was dying was that that my mom didn't have her own mom to lean on any more, that all of her strength, which built a wall of love and safety around me, came from her and her alone. I don't know how I will ever be so strong without her. 

She still drives me crazy.  She's a chronic over-sharer and occasional busybody.  She tends towards vanity and obsesses over everyone's thinness and fatness like a walking US Weekly.  I have never had to own a scale because I know my weight by her inferences.  I refuse to be her Facebook friend because she has a way of teasing me that I don't have a sense of humor about.  But I can only imagine what irritates her about me, with my incessant requests for babysitting and relentless nagging to quit smoking and eat some vegetables. She is still my hero, she still shows me all the time how to keep living on this devastating and mystifying of planets.

Grandma Marion, Me, Mom (this photo is a repeat but it's my favorite so here it is again)

BLOSSOMS

Spring has sprung!  So Roan and I went to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens to take it all in.

I love this couple looking at the map.  I think their hair goes well with the foliage, don't you?